In 2022, I did a roundup of my favourite films of the year, even though I’d only managed to see a small handful of new films that came out. Last year I did the same, and I was fairly proud that I’d managed to see nearly 20 films at the cinema that year as well as some streaming exclusives. I considered it a job well done. This year, I’ve seen 76 films. If we’re factoring in streaming exclusives and catching up on films later, 92. So as you can see, I’ve got a bit more to work with. As a result we’re going to do this a bit differently. We’re going to go roughly in chronological order, focusing on specific films, performances, moments and anything else that I fancy. Because one thing you can say about this year, for better or worse, is that it was eventful. 

For us in the UK, January and February can be seen as the season where we get all the Oscar holdovers – quite literally in the sense that The Holdovers came out around then – as well as any of the bad horror films that studios like to dump in the month so they won’t get noticed. Night Swim was definitely the most pathetic of those examples, with March’s Imaginary being a close second.

But back to the Oscar contenders – I quite enjoyed Poor Things but I always felt like it was trying to say more than it actually did, either that or it was just really, really weird. I already discussed The Holdovers in July and a rewatch did it even more justice, but The Zone of Interest just felt lacking to me – I didn’t know quite what I was supposed to feel and that threw me off. Surprises for me came in the form of The End We Start From and The Iron Claw, two very powerful and sobering dramas that had some great performances.

Going into the spring, the big film was Dune: Part Two which didn’t really do much for me. I’m not knocking the craft behind it, I just didn’t really care what was going on. What these months offered me were some exceptional performances in horror films. If the Oscars gave out awards for best actors and actresses in horror, then Best Actor should undoubtedly go to David Dastmalchian for his fantastic turn as a tortured talk-show host in Late Night With The Devil, but picking out Best Actress is a challenge. 

Sydney Sweeney showed up to play in Immaculate, and so did Nell Tiger-Free in the surprisingly decent Omen prequel, The First Omen. For the record I do think Immaculate was the better film (The First Omen was too bloated for one thing), but both Sweeney and Free were phenomenal and both films have scenes which will go down in horror history. If you’ve seen the films you’ll know which scenes I’m talking about, and both women knock it out the park in them.

The month of April also saw me at the most on-edge I was in the cinema. When Alex Garland wanted to craft a dystopian America in Civil War, it turns out his task was easy – just get Jesse Plemons to play an extreme nationalist for a few minutes (or elect Donald Trump again, entirely up to you).

The first half of the year also established something rather unfortunate as 2024 proved to be a rough year for blockbusters. Madame Web represents everything wrong with modern comic-book films – dragging a new director through the mud, constantly messing about with it in post-production, and showing a complete lack of respect for the audience. To me it’s still probably the year’s worst film, though I’d be lying if I said the overstuffed nostalgia-based sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, was much better. One had Patton Oswalt in it though, so Ghostbusters easily wins.

This isn’t to say that some of the blockbusters weren’t satisfying. The Fall Guy was a wonderfully enjoyable action film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was a surprisingly solid continuation of the incredible 2010s trilogy, and Wicked has proven to be a hit movie musical for the ages. However, for every one of those, we still had the underwhelming Alien: Romulus (yeah I said it) and a two-hour cynical existential crisis in the form of Joker: Folie A Deux, where Todd Phillips was so disinterested in what he’d made he spent the weekend of its release in seclusion on his ranch.

On the other hand Smile 2 actually bested the original, Inside Out 2 was phenomenal, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice proved to be a ton of fun as well. It easily ties with The Iron Claw for containing the best needle-drop of the year as well, with the hilariously melancholic MacArthur Park being used in a fantastic wedding scene. 

And if you want my picks for the worst needle-drops of the year, Argylle could have picked any old Beatles song to show a decades-long relationship and instead picked the one that was less than six months old, Challengers thought that a long-forgotten 1980s Bowie track was good music for a teenage girl’s birthday party (at least have people dance to the sax solo in Modern Love, come on), and Kraven the Hunter knew it was going to bomb Nagasaki-style so it decided that its cast could just lipsync Black Sabbath and no-one would recognise the obvious voice of Ozzy bloody Osbourne.

Anyway, back to normal service. This year saw some great actors making their directorial debuts and seeing success. Anna Kendrick made the very impressive Netflix original Woman of the Hour, and Dev Patel got his John Wick on for Monkey Man, a wonderfully stylised and nicely gritted actioner that ran a bit long but lived in its own unique world. Films that I’d heavily anticipated mostly lived up to expectations too. Hugh Grant delivered one of his best performances in the solid horror-thriller Heretic, and Sean Baker’s Anora was a wild ride anchored by the amazing Mikey Madison. 

The last thing I want to talk about though is the year’s biggest surprises. My strategy of going to the cinema this year was to see whatever interested me. Even the things I knew would be bad I was still motivated by morbid curiosity. I may have seen Madame Web this year, but I also saw The Substance which completely snuck up on all of us as one of the most out-there, bonkers, deranged and brilliant bits of body horror in recent memory. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are fantastic, I felt sick to my stomach in the best way possible, and it has not left my head since seeing it. In fact the autumn was full of surprises – I loved A Different Man, I thought The Apprentice was really powerful, and The Wild Robot is one of Dreamworks’s best films ever. 

So that’s a whistle-stop tour through what I saw this year. There’s many more that I neglected to mention at risk of making myself dizzy trying to get everything in, but as far as my own personal consensus goes, this was a really solid year for film. Not necessarily in the bid-budget category, but this was a year full of variety and interesting ideas. Very few films half-arsed it, and those that went all the way delivered something truly special. When I look back on this year, I’ll think of watching The Substance with a packed audience as our mouths hung open. I’ll think of my nails digging into the seat as Jesse Plemons paraded around with a gun. I’ll think of how I cracked a smile at the weirdness of I Saw The TV Glow and Kinds of Kindness. I’ll think of just how much fun I had seeing so much this year. My bank account may want to kill me, but 2024 made me really excited to watch new films, and I pray that 2025 will continue to do the same. 

Thank you once again for reading my babblings for another year, and I look forward to doing the same next year. Have a good Christmas everybody, and see you in 2025!

Coming soon, an epic two part podcast that runs through 2024 in much greater detail…

Alex’s Archive – 2024 in Review